I'm installing Gentoo for the first time. I picked an old Mac Mini PowerPC G4. I've gotten it up, kernel built and on the network, but the X server won't start. The weird thing is that it's failing with an error message that references MMX!

Am I doing something wrong? Any help and/or hints for this Gentoo n00b would be greatly appreciated.

Here's what happens when I try to run Xorg with a freshly-xac-created xorg.conf:

Code:

abby ~ # Xorg -config xorg.conf
_XSERVTransSocketOpenCOTSServer: Unable to open socket for inet6
_XSERVTransOpen: transport open failed for inet6/abby:0
_XSERVTransMakeAllCOTSServerListeners: failed to open listener for inet6

Section "Files"
### Multiple FontPath entries are allowed (which are concatenated
### together as well as specifying multiple comma-separated
### entries in one FontPath command (or both methods)
###
### For X Font Server support, uncomment this and comment the
### other FontPaths. (This is not required for most configurations)
# FontPath "unix/:-1"

Even on PPC, xorg should start without a xorg.conf. udev will detect your input devices and xorg will try all of your open source video drivers.
Thats the first test. run startx with no xorg.conf. Don't delete xorg.conf, you will need a stub to set your keyboard layout, if you don't like the default USA.

This news item is relevant to you only if you have a Radeon graphics
chipset and use the free/open source driver.

The r600 driver that provides 3D acceleration for Radeon HD 2400 and
later cards comes in the "classic" and "gallium" variants. The gallium
driver is based on the new Gallium3D infrastructure and was chosen as
the default driver for media-libs/mesa-7.11.

Existing users will not be switched automatically. To switch to the
r600 gallium driver, use the following command:

eselect mesa set r600 gallium

Gallium3D requires kernel modesetting (KMS). If your system is not yet
configured for KMS, consult the X Server Configuration HOWTO for
instructions prior to switching:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml

So for grins I ran these three commands to disable the Gallium driver:

...and then re-emerged mesa and xorg-server. Now it works--Gnome starts up happily per the instructions at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gnome-config.xml. Unfortunately I had to catch an airplane this morning and won't get back to play with the machine until this weekend.

In the meantime I'll try to educate myself on emerge/portage to see what patches are applied to the base llvm-2.8. Maybe someone back-ported a patch from llvm-2.9 Subversion into Gentoo's llvm-2.8, causing the breakage reported in the freedesktop bugzilla entry above?